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Novel

All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West · 1931

Synopsis

Henry Holland, Earl of Slane, a former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India, dies at the age of ninety-four. His widow, Lady Slane, is eighty-eight; their six children, four sons and two daughters, are all approaching old age. Gathered together, they decide to lodge her with each of them in turn. She listens to them, then announces that she has other plans: she will rent a small house in Hampstead that she noticed thirty years earlier, and settle there with her old French maid, Genoux.

Context

The novel was published by the publishing house run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, whose lover its author had been, and ranked among the house's great successes. The title comes from the last line of a tragedy by Milton, in which calm of mind follows the extinction of the passions. Its author was not yet forty when she wrote this book about a woman of nearly ninety, and had just bought the dilapidated castle of which she was going to make a garden.

Who it is for

A short novel, under three hundred pages in French; translated by Micha Venaille, it is available in paperback.

Prizes and reception

Its author's garden at Sissinghurst, open to the public, received nearly two hundred thousand visitors in 2017.

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